Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (33 page)

The agency that had imprisoned me and kept me from my family, had only released me on the basis that I handed over the Jigsaw Man. No Jigsaw Man, no wife and child. However, I didn't want to hand him over. Do that and I'd be consigning four people to their deaths. And how did I know I could trust the agency in any case? If they locked the
Sgt. Pepper
guys up because they didn't understand them, why would they let me walk free when they had no good explanation for my aircraft evacuation?

'This is like baseball on a Valium overdose,' said a voice, as someone sat in the seat to the right of me. At the same time, the seat on my left was occupied. Agent Crosskill had spoken, Agent No Name had joined him in flanking me. 'And baseball's shit to begin with,' he concluded.

'You disappeared again,' she said. 'You're going to have to stop doing that, or we're just going to have to lock you up. Feed the key to the crocodiles.'

I took a drink of cider. Didn't want to rush it, but didn't want to take too long over it so that it became lukewarm. The pie was finished, I thought I'd wait for Harold Lloyd and his friend to vanish before I opened the crisps.

'I've got something for you,' I said. I laid down the glass, reached into the bag and gave Crosskill the CIA folder. They both glanced over their shoulders and looked around for cameras when they noticed the markings on the outside.

Crosskill flicked quickly through the report, but this was a trained guy. He was reading every word. He grunted a few times, then eventually he leaned across me and handed it to his pal. She made the same quick read through but without the grunting. I sat in between them and drank. Had already decided that one cider was enough. I'd probably leave it a while then have a coffee.

'Where d'you get this?' she asked.

As she spoke, she folded the file in half and slipped it inside her jacket. I wondered what kinds of pockets she had, but when I glanced at her there really was no sign of the file.

'A friend gave it to me,' I said.

'What friend?'

I had already prepared the answer, as I'd been waiting for their arrival since the moment I'd left the Jigsaw Man's café.

'A Polish film star. His name’s Piotr.'

'When did he give it to you?'

'In Seattle.'

'Why didn't you show it to us in Seattle?'

'I needed to think about it. Sure I know some stuff about the Beatles, but I'd never been to Abbey Road before so I thought I'd come and compare the descriptions in there with what I saw around me.'

'The person who wrote the report could have done that. Doesn't mean it wasn't a joke.'

'I know. I just wanted time to think.'

'And what have you thought so far?' asked Crosskill, as usual arriving late to the interrogation.

'I thought that if Paul McCartney wasn't part of the Beatles when they recorded
Sgt. Pepper
, then perhaps you're not looking for four Jigsaw Men after all. Perhaps you're only looking for three. Perhaps the guy I used to see back in Glasgow is one of the three you've got in custody already. Which was what I thought at the time.'

'Well, wouldn't that be convenient for you?' said Crosskill.

'I don't even know what I want, so I have no conception of convenience or not. I've been living the dream the last few days. Travelling the world first class, expensive suites in expensive hotels. Living the dream. I just don't know that I want to do this for the rest of my life if I'm searching for someone who doesn't exist. I might start to feel guilty about all the money I'm spending.'

'It's nice that you think we're not going to get it back off you,' said Crosskill glibly. I ignored him. It wasn't as though I didn't understand that they held total dominion over me.

'Where did you go once you left the Abbey Road studio?' asked the woman.

She wasn't looking at me, her eyes on the cricket. Since sitting down I'd seen numerous examples of the immaculate forward defensive. 315-4 had become 326-4. Time was passing.

'Went into a café,' I said. 'Had a flat white. Great coffee. Maximum taste, perfect blend of bitter and sweet. Went to the bathroom. Came out on the street the other side of Abbey Road, don't know its name, started walking. Didn't really intend coming here, but I was passing and...'

'Which café? We didn't see you go into a café.'

'Didn't catch the name.'

'You're a very unreliable witness.'

'That's as may be. However, what you have in your pocket there is proof, from your own CIA, that Paul McCartney died just before they started recording
Sgt. Pepper
, in the year before its release. There were only three Beatles on that album, so there are only three Jigsaw Men, and you have them all. You can do with them what you will.'

Agent Crosskill grunted. His friend surprised me by applauding as the batsmen laced a lovely cover drive through the infield for four.

'Love cricket,' she said. 'Absolute metaphor for life.'

––––––––

W
e drove down the M4. At least, I was pretty sure it was the M4. The windows in the car, while not being blacked out, were at least very, very dark, so I could barely see anything. But I got the vague impression we were on the M4. Heading to the south-west. Heading back to Bristol.

It was a large comfortable car. I was sitting next to Crosskill, his buddy across from us, her back to the driver. She was reading through a file. Crosskill was sitting completely still, eyes open, staring straight ahead.

'What's the date?' I asked at some point.

Neither of them answered, as if they couldn't be bothered speaking and were hoping the other one would get it.

'What's the date?' I asked again, having given them about half a minute.

'May tenth,' said Crosskill.

I shook my head, held the expletive that came to mind. I hadn't even noticed the date the last few days, it had been so unimportant, not even when I'd had a boarding card in my hand. The tenth of May. I had originally been picked up to go to the airport on the seventeenth of December. Brin and Baggins hadn't seen me for close on five months; with my extra six months in the Highlands, I hadn't seen them in nearly eleven.

Suddenly I was going home, and all those things I hadn't thought about since they'd lured me into the car outside the coffee shop suddenly came flooding back. But it was different now. Back in December, I was going home not having seen my family for a while, but with them having said goodbye that morning. Now, however, I wondered if they might have become used to life without me.

'You're taking me home?' I asked.

The female agent looked up from her file and nodded. Her face almost had a look of curiosity about it, as though she was surprised I felt the need to ask.

'Don't they think I'm dead?' I said.

She shook her head. Crosskill grunted.

'You're still there,' she said.

'What d'you mean?'

She finally closed her file and looked at me. A long, unyielding gaze. The kind of gaze I would have wilted beneath a while ago, but no more. Maybe I was turning into Bruce Willis at last.

'What d'you mean?' I repeated.

She glanced at Crosskill, and then did something else with the file. Like she was closing it again, just for the sake of it. The way that people cock their gun in a movie, even though it doesn't need to be cocked, or they would have had it cocked minutes earlier in real life.

'You've been there the entire time,' she said. 'They won't have missed you.'

I shook my head. 'That can't be.'

'Why?'

'The other me, the one that was at home all the time I was up in Scotland. He got on the plane. He would have died in the crash. I saw the list of everyone who died. I was on the list.'

She shook her head. I could hear Agent Crosskill making vague disparaging noises to my right, but I wasn't looking at him. Not that Agent No Name was wilting under my steady gaze.

'We fixed that,' she said.

'What?'

'We were monitoring your moves. We saw what you were checking for online. We amended the page you were looking at to show that you were on the plane.'

'Why?'

She shrugged, looked slightly nonplussed, as though she hadn't thought about it before.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Guess we didn't want you freaking out about there being two of you. Didn't want you to suddenly think you had to go running off home to fight this other guy who was nailing your wife.

About a hundred things come rushing into my head at the same time, but all that came out was, 'Why didn't I, the other me, why didn't I die in the crash this time?'

'He never got on the plane,' she said. 'We stopped him.'

'Why'd you do that?'

Again she looked surprised by this then shrugged.

'I don't know. Seemed a thing to do.'

'Why? God, can you just explain yourself? Please.'

Crosskill let out an exasperated sigh, then they shared a glance and it was apparent she had non-verbally handed over explanation duties.

'Will you two just stop messing around? I brought you the thing, the least you can do is give me some sort of explanation.'

'We've been looking for the last of the guys you call the Jigsaw Man for a number of years,' said Crosskill. 'We follow internet traffic related to the Beatles. Looking for clues, you know the score.'

'You find stuff on the internet about the Beatles? Wow, is there some sort of specialist training for that?'

'The man's a comedian,' said Crosskill. 'And here's me, all this time, thinking you were dull as shit.'

'Agent Crosskill,' said his partner, with an uncommon tone of seniority.

Crosskill made some sort of grudging acceptance of the rebuke and continued with a small dismissive hand gesture.

'We found you through those articles you wrote about the Beatles. One of our people found you. They realised you were living some sort of rogue life, tracked you down, discovered your identity.'

'The night my room got broken into...' I said.

Crosskill made an even more dismissive hand gesture.

'Whatever. We're big picture people, don't know nothing about that kind of shit. The men on the ground discovered there were two of you. Now, I don't know what you were thinking about that, but it's not the first time we've seen it. It happens...'

He caught the eye of his partner, another slight admonishment from her, and again he continued with a movement of his hand.

'So we had you both followed. At some point we decided to bring you both in. You, we were just going to lift off the street. No one knew where you were, who you were. The other guy, we had one of our operatives contact him undercover claiming to be a film producer. You'd written some lousy script a while back.
The Jigsaw Man
. That was another interesting thing about you. So, that was the plan. Then, just a day or two ahead of the flight, when he was about to get on the plane and we were about to bring you in, you made a move. You came back to your home town. We tracked you, realised what you were doing. Looked like you intended letting the other guy get on the plane, while you went home. Interesting, we thought.'

'Usually these situations, when there's been some sort of replication taking place, there's a fulcrum point,' said his partner, butting in. Crosskill shook his head at the interruption. 'A point in time when everything comes together, or falls apart. We realised that it was the flight. Something was going to happen to that flight. Well, once a flight's taken off, there are only two things that can happen. It can land, or it can crash. This kind of phenomenon, a replication event, is far more likely to occur after a crash. A big crash, something extreme. So it seemed likely to us that there was going to be an accident, and that somehow you'd managed to get yourself off that crashing plane and had gone back in time. Wouldn't be the first time.'

'But I was only on the flight in the first place because you set it up,' I said. 'I would never have gone back in time six months and written those online articles if you hadn't sent me there.'

Crosskill barked out a laugh.

'You thought yourself off a plane crash, right?'

I nodded.

'And that's logical?'

I stared at his partner. There was an awful lot that wasn't logical, and I had long ago realised that I was unlikely to get an explanation. Indeed, that there would be no explanation.

'We decided to stop the guy getting on the plane, see what happened. We brought you in. Cancelled his booking at the last minute. Sent him home to your wife and kid.'

'He's been there all this time?'

I could feel the hand gripping my stomach. It was one thing him living the life I'd already gone through. But not far off five months with Brin and Baggins, storing up memories, going through new experiences, attending Baggins' netball games, seeing her teachers at the parents evening, taking her to the cinema, while I rotted in a cell; it was unconscionable.

'Of course,' he said. 'What'd you think was happening?'

'And what about the plane?'

'It crashed. Everybody died.'

I looked at Crosskill and then back at the woman. She shrugged.

'Sure, there was something weird going on with you, but we had to let it play out.'

'You had to let the plane crash?'

'We didn't
know
it was going to crash,' said Crosskill, sounding for a moment like he belonged on the
Sopranos
.

'She just said you thought it was likely the plane would crash.'

'There was no one of significance on the plane,' she said coldly. 'You yourself, if I may remind you, did nothing to stop it taking off the second time.'

I hadn't thought about that in four-and-a-half months. I hadn't wanted to think about that at all.

I leaned forward, rested my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands. For a moment I was back on the plane, people screaming, every fibre of the plane juddering, desperate to break apart.

'And it was you who got me off the plane at the last second?' I asked.

I looked up at her. She shook her head.

'We have no idea how you got off that plane,' said Crosskill. 'Why d'you think we asked you about eight hundred times why you weren't on it? After the plane crashed, we worked that part out. You must have been on it in some other time frame, and then got off it again. You were thrown backwards. We didn't know what was going on.'